Generation rent: who's listening?

The number of private renters has now surpassed those in social housing for the first time, making them a political force to be reckoned with. But not everyone is convinced

Greg Moore outside his home, with his children Hannah, Emma and Harvey. The family moved into rented accommodation after they had difficulty keeping up mortgage payments. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian Graham Turner/Guardian

Fiona Elsted lives with her husband and three children – aged 11, eight and six – on the south side of Colchester in Essex. En route from the railway station, the taxi driver who takes me to her house does his best to position her neighbourhood within the complicated matrix that is the English class system. "It's quite a posh area," he says. "Not posh posh, though."

When we get there, I understand what he means. Elsted's home is a semi-detached three-bedroomer – Edwardian, by the look of it – that suggests a solid kind of middle-class comfort (Zoopla puts the average house-price here at just under £250,000). She and her husband work at the University of Essex. Everything fits, apart from one crucial detail: they rent rather than own their home, and to some people, that distinction is enough to push them out of any halfway "posh" demographic and into a very different social category.

Elsted is 45, and lectures in Tesol (teaching English to speakers of other languages). She was raised in a council house in Chelmsford, and spent most of her 20s overseas. A couple of months ago, she tried her luck with an online wheeze called the Great British Class Calculator. When she pretended she had a mortgage, she made into the "established middle class", one step down from the "elite". But if she told the truth her about her housing arrangements, she was placed in something called the "emergent service class", ranked fifth out of seven, and placed next to the traditional working class.

Since April this year, Elsted has been a prolific blogger, writing about her anomalous life – and in particular, the downsides of living in what officialspeak calls "private rented" housing. When one post was turned into a guest blog for Mumsnet, it clearly resonated with hundreds of people, not least when it came to her account of the anxiety and insecurity that can often arrive out of the blue.

"There were just streams and streams of comments, saying: 'We're in the same position,'" she says. "That made me feel good on a personal level, but also angry that nobody's done anything about it. But I know why that's the case – because when people do try to stand up and say: 'Where I'm living isn't good for my children because there's mould on the walls', or 'It'd be really nice if you'd change the windows because there's so much condensation', potentially the landlord can say: 'You're being a bit problematic now – I think it would be easier for you to move on.'"

Earlier this year, that is roughly what happened to Elsted and her family. Having long found it impossible to amass enough money for the deposit on a mortgage, they had been living for five years in a rented three-bedroom home around 20 miles from Colchester. As time went on, they started to experience problems with some of the windows, which let in condensation. Eventually, things became "much more severe. If one window was opened, it was in danger of not shutting again. And there were terrible winds, so it was flapping in the wind. And this was in my daughter's bedroom." She says her landlord had promised things would be fixed, but when she insisted that he did so, her family was presented with a grim choice. At first, he said it was time for them to move out; then, he said he would do the repairs, on the condition that the rent went up. Both sparked no end of worry – and at that point, she says: "I thought, the most important lesson I can give my children is that when people start doing things like that, you should do something different, and move away from it."

'I'm difficult to categorise' … university lecturer and private renter Fiona Elstead at home in Colchester. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian Graham Turner/Guardian

Research published in 2013 suggested that families who live in rented homes are nine times more likely than homeowners to have moved in the last 12 months. And what has recently befallen Elsted and her family highlights what that means in practice: not just the cost of changing homes, but the headache of finding new school places, and dealing with probably the most disruptive experience that children can go through. Now, she tells me, her landlady is "very, very nice", and the family can settle down, but there is still fallout from what has happened. "Every now and then, we have a lot of tears. And nightmares. There's a lot of upset about it all. A lot of insecurity. It rocked the children's faith, I think. They were surprised that an adult could make promises that weren't kept."

As proved by political events during the past week or two, the issues that so exercise Elsted and thousands of others like her are belatedly moving into the mainstream. Last Thursday, Ed Miliband announced a handful of new policies aimed at capping rent increases once a tenancy has been agreed, introducing three-year tenancies with new protections against arbitrary moves by landlords ("an enormous step in the right direction," says Elsted), and stopping letting agencies from charging tenants simply for the signing of a rental agreement.

Though some of what Miliband said chimed with the government's own draft "tenant's charter" – published last year, but since apparently mothballed – the dependably overheated Conservative party chairman Grant Shapps accused him of planning "Venezuelan-style rent controls", and at this week's prime minister's questions, the Labour leader went on the offensive. After all, characterising populist measures as dangerous red meddling was exactly what the Tories did when Miliband made a very popular proposal to freeze energy bills – so this time, he set out his new housing policies and asked an obvious enough question: "Can the prime minister tell us when he expects to make the inevitable journey from saying they represent dangerous, Venezuelan-style thinking to saying they're actually quite a good idea?"

Alex Hilton is a 38-year-old London resident who has spent most of his life in privately rented housing, a former Labour-aligned blogger, and the director of a new campaign called Generation Rent, essentially a rebranded version of the National Private Tenants Organisation, which was founded in 2011. The politics of privately rented housing, he tells me, are fascinating, highlighting a rapidly increasing part of the British electorate who defy the usual stereotypes, and have yet to find their worries and fears answered by people in Westminster – but may yet assume huge political clout.

In the 1980s, an assumption came to sit at the heart not just of British politics, but our national culture: that most people were either mortgage-paying homeowners, or the beneficiaries of what we used to call council housing, but is these days more accurately described as "social rented" accommodation. In this view, private lets were largely the preserve of students, footloose twentysomethings, various types of bohemian, and the simply unlucky – so any meaningful recognition that people lived in privately rented homes never made it much beyond the fondly loved sitcom Rising Damp, or very occasional panics about slum landlords (one thinks here of a particularly crestfallen line from the Smiths' Miserable Lie, released in 1984: "What do we get for our trouble and pain – a rented room in Whalley Range").

Over the past 15 years, though, Hilton explains, something drastic has happened. Between the censuses of 2001 and 2011, the numbers of households in the private-rented sector in England and Wales went from 1.9 million to 3.6 million; the proportion had risen 69%. The total number of people living in privately rented homes is now put at around 9 million, and Generation Rent reckons that in the UK as whole, it is in advance of 10 million. A watershed has therefore been reached: privately renting tenants now outnumber those in social housing.

This change has been met by a ballooning in the number of private landlords, 72% of whom let out just one home. The increase in tenants, meanwhile, has been driven by escalating house prices, stagnating wages, an ongoing failure to build enough social housing, and for many people, the impossibility of amassing enough money for a deposit for a mortgage.

"Now, a lot of people who can't raise a deposit are relatively wealthy: people on average earnings or more," says Hilton. "And they've got to a situation where the difference between them buying a home or not is whether their parents have assets they're going to leave them when they die."

He mentions the fashionable analysis of inequality authored by the French economist Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century, and reckons that privately rented housing is now the defining factor tying together a new tranche of the British electorate, something to which politicians are only just waking up. Generation Rent recently commissioned a poll that showed that 35% of people in the private sector identified themselves as swing voters. Moreover, according to Generation Rent's research, there are currently 86 MPs for constituencies where the 35% of private-sector households represents more voters than their existing majority, so the political stakes might be very high.

Generation Rent campaigns for a punchy set of changes, many of which intersect with the agenda pushed by the longstanding housing charity Shelter: the introduction of a national register of landlords; the official licensing of letting agencies; the application in the private market of the minimum decency standards that apply to social housing (nearly a third of privately rented homes have what is called category 1 safety hazards – dangerous enough to present a severe threat to health or safety); and the building of between 250,000 and 300,000 affordable homes every year. The changes proposed by Labour, says Hilton, are not "anywhere near as radical as Grant Shapps would have you believe". Nonetheless, he says, Labour's plans could have "really beneficial effects", and provide "very important protection from exploitation".

More, then, is obviously required. "But this is the right time," says Hilton, "and I'm very confident that politicians will move on it. It'll be fixed, but what's important is that it gets fixed before there's a complete crisis."

In thousands of people's lives, unfortunately, that crisis has already arrived. Greg Moore, 44, and his family live in Fakenham, at the northern tip of Norfolk. His three children are 15, 13, and eight. He's a self-employed IT and electrical consultant; his wife is unable to work owing to medical problems. In July 2011, because of difficulty keeping up with their mortgage payments, they moved into a privately rented three-bedroom house with a rent of £575 a month, owned by a professional landlord with other properties in the area.By the start of the winter, Moore noticed large amounts of mould growing in a bathroom ("all around the ceiling, down the walls – everywhere, basically"), which soon spread elsewhere in the house, not least to his eldest child's bedroom.

There was a promise to provide a fan to keep the room dry, but it never came. In November 2013, Moore says he put in the latest of many calls to the maintenance company he had been told to contact. "I said: 'I've redecorated this bathroom three times. My children have got coughs.'" Growing increasingly desperate, he then wrote directly to his landlord – and a week before Christmas, he says he received a letter from his letting agent telling him that he and his family would soon have to move. This is known as a Section 21 notice, in honour of the requisite part of the Housing Act of 1988. Providing that everything is done in writing, and people are give two months' notice, it allows landlords to force tenants out of their homes once an initial fixed term has ended, without any obligation to explain why. "You can be a model tenant," says Moore, "but they have the right to say: 'No – I want you out.'"

On the face of it, then, this was what housing professionals call a "revenge eviction". At Shelter, policy specialist Kate Webb reckons that they happen to around 200,000 people every year. "A lot of people live in poor-quality accommodation, but they're very well aware that if they complain, the landlord is just as likely to evict them as fix the problem," she says. "The first thing any Shelter adviser has to say to anyone complaining about poor conditions is: 'I will tell you what to do, and what your options are, but in the current legislative framework, your landlord can evict you if you complain.'"

Moore says that environmental health officers paid the house a visit and agreed there were big issues, but that the landlord would only agree to fix things once he and his family moved out. "It completely ruined Christmas," he says. All three of his children have Asperger's, and the eldest is about to sit his GCSEs. "It's created merry hell for the last five months. People with Asperger's like everything to be in order. But it wasn't until the end of April that we knew we had somewhere to live." The Moores now live in a housing association home, offered via his local council. "And they can't kick you out without reason. Now, there's no way I'd go back to private renting. It all needs to be properly regulated. It's absolutely crazy. Landlords need to be held to account for a duty of care."

Moore says that he is aware of what Ed Miliband has proposed for the private-rented system, but when I push him on whether it might make him more likely to vote Labour, Generation Rent's vision of a new part of the electorate that is open to offers turns to dust. "Politicians are all the same," he says. "They can't be trusted. I don't have a very high opinion of them, I'm afraid."

And then something that cuts straight to heart of life in an ever-expanding part of society that, for the moment, remains as precarious as ever. "When a little chap like me tries to fight for his rights, he hasn't got a hope in hell."

• This article was amended on 25 May 2014. The earlier version said "the numbers of households in the private-rented sector in England and Wales went from 1.9 million to 3.6 million, an increase of 69%".

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